Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Asyndetic Triplets with Privative Prefixes
Calvert Watkins (1933-2013), How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 113:
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The figure of anaphora, repetition of a sound, word, or phrase at the beginning of successive verses or other units is very common in Vedic. RV 8.70.11 combines a phonetic anaphora in a(nya-) 'other-' and a(va) 'off with a semantic one in a- 'un-', and concludes with the repetition of the same word at the end of pādas c and d, a sort of 'cataphora' known as punaḥpadam (chap. 4 n.8), which runs through 6 verses of the hymn. The strophe is bṛhatī, 8/8/12/8 syllables:I don't have access to J.N. Adams, Asyndeton and its Interpretation in Latin Literature: History, Patterns, Textual Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), but I extracted the following images from a digital copy on Google Books (pp. 99-102 in the hard copy book, I think):anyávratam ámānuṣamFor the anaphora of privative compounds of similar semantics compare Il. 9.63-4:
áyajvānam ádevayum
áva sváḥ sákhā dudhuvīta párvataḥ
sughnā́ya dásyum párvataḥ
Him who follows another commandment, the non-man,
non-worshipping godless one,
may his (your?) friend the mountain shake down,
the mountain the barbarian, the easier to slay.ἀφρήτωρ ἀθέμιστος ἀνέστιός ἐστιν ἐκεῖνοςThis figure can be securely posited for the poetic grammar of the protolanguage.
ὃς πολέμου ἔραται ἐπιδημίου ὀκρυόεντος.
Clanless, lawless, hearthless is he
that lusts for chilling war among his own people.
Labels: asyndetic privative adjectives